Hello Jim,

It is odd to answer a question by saying "I don't know", but I don't know. Hume famously states that facts alone are morally inert, and require sentiment in order for them to provide moral motivation. This is the supposed is/ought divide or the fact/value distinction, which is sometimes referred to as "Hume's Guillotine". I say "supposed" because Hume never divorced fact and value or is and ought. He simply said we cannot get to values from facts alone or to oughts from ises alone. He says a third ingredient (sentiment or emotion) must enter the picture for us to arrive at a value or an ought.

William James was of the opinion that logic itself was dependent upon properly functioning emotions. This seemed far-fetched at the time, but in recent years Antonio Damasio's work dealing with the brain's inability to make simple decisions without using emotions (primarily addressed in terms of the amygdala) would seem to indicate that our emotions are much more necessary for thought and judgment than we previously thought.

Robert Solomon has engaged this topic in more than one of his books. It is his Not Passion's Slave which really sets forth his notion of emotions as judgments. He has a little thought experiment in the book where he invites the reader to imagine themselves to have heard a report about someone they trusted having said disparaging things about them. He then invites the reader to imagine what sorts of feelings they would have after hearing such a report. Then, when you (the reader) are in the middle of feeling those feelings he asks you to imagine that you have now discovered that the report you had been given about this friend was false. They never said those things about you. He then poses a question: what happened to those feelings you had toward that friend? Presumably they dissipated. Thus, feelings are based upon judgments.

This whole area is a fascinating one Jim. You have stated above, "moral judgment is primarily a product of intuition, a cognitive process thought to be grounded primarily in affect and emotion." I am unaware of the converging evidence which you say points to this conclusion. Were you to say that "moral judgment requires intuition, affect, and emotion" I would readily agree. However, I don't believe we can remove reasoning and cognition from this process any more than we can remove feeling. So, I am not ready to say that it is "grounded" in emotion, but I am more than willing to say that it "necessitates" emotion. Thus, I would have to say that I do not believe that moral emotions are actually irreducible moral categories.

Hello Bill,

My apologies for the delay and my thanks, as always, for your thought provoking response. You are correct in that my thinking is influenced by Damasio’s fascinating work (as well as that of Joshua Greene and Liane Young.)

Thank you for recommending Solomon’s books, which I will investigate with interest.

By “converging evidence” I mean to reference the work of Jonathan Haidt and colleagues (see particularly the phenomenon of ‘moral dumbfounding’), Jesse Prinz’s strong version of ‘sentimentalism’, and recent work on so called “trolley cases” (esp. Joshua Greene and co-workers). I agree with you that reason will always be a vital part of the picture, but at least some moral judgments seem to reducible *only* to emotionally grounded ultimate ends, beyond which no further justification can be provided. I am aware that I am dangerously close to endorsing a sort of philosophical intuitionism here, but there is one crucial difference in my view: if the emotionally grounded ultimate ends are inculcated by tacit experience (or consciously through a type of Aristotelian habituation), then one need not appeal to any ‘self-evident moral truths’.

Jim are you referring to Haidt's The Righteous Mind? I have purchased it and then not gotten around to reading beyond the first chapter. If it engages this topic then I need to get back to it and finish my reading.

I must confess that I am unfamiliar with Joshua Greene. Would you please point me to a book or article that would familiarize me with his research/theory?

Thanks,

Bill

Hi Bill,

A good place to start with Haidt's work is his 2001 article, "The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgement." Psychological Review 108: 814-834. For Joshua Greene, you can try his Moral Cognition Lab, located here (http://wjh.harvard.edu/~mcl/) - there are references to a number of his publications there. Finally, I might also recommend Jesse Prinz's 2006 paper "The emotional basis of moral judgments, Philosophical Explorations, Vol. 9, No. 1.

With Regards,

Jim

Hello Jim,

I took Joshua Greene's Moral Sense Test. It appears to consist largely of variations on the Trolley Problem. Some are more extreme (the equivalent of pushing the fat man onto the tracks) whereas others are more a matter of pure survival or non-survival for all parties. He seems to have refined the Trolley Problem to an art in itself. It was very interesting. I downloaded Haidt's article and will read it.

Thank you,

Bill

Hi Jim,

I think your question is an interesting one. I'll situate my answer in Haidt's framework of the five moral intuitions (Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity) and with specific respect to the moral emotion of guilt.

Theorizing by Tangney, Stuewig, & Mashek (2007) argues that guilt is (1) a self-conscious emotion (i.e., we're aware that we're feeling it), and (2) that it arises when we perceive that we have acted "immorally" providing us feedback on the moral acceptability of our actions.

Haidt's framework would argue that our behaviors can fall into one of the five moral domains, depending on whether we (or others) perceive the behavior to violate (negative behavior) or adhere to (positive behavior) one or more of the five intuitions. For example, killing a dog could be perceived to be a violation of the harm/care intuition; caring for a sick dog could be perceived to be adherence to harm/care intuition. Another example, urinating on the American flag could be perceived as a violation of the ingroup/loyalty intuition; saluting the flag could be perceived as adherence to the ingroup/loyalty intuition.

Now, guilt could be felt for violations of any of the five intuitions. For example, some individual might feel guilty after s/he kills a dog (a violation of harm/care), urinates on the American flag (a violation of ingroup/loyalty), shoots up with heroin (a violation of purity/sanctity), etc.

So guilt is an emotion, which some might argue is irreducible in that sense. However, what elicits guilt will vary largely based on an individual's interpretation of their own behavior. For example, an abortion protester who blows up an abortion clinic likely might not feel guilty for their behavior, because they don't perceive it to be a violation of their morals; in fact, they might feel another moral emotion (pride) for behaving in a way that they felt to be adhering to another important intuition or even the same intuition (in this instance, they might feel that they were actually adhering to the harm/care intuition because they are "protecting innocent fetuses").

-Matt

Since we have sophisticated theories of morality, I think, ''irreducible moral categories'' is just a metaphor. At best, we have mental modules/neural circuits that make moral experience (feelings, emotions, acts and thoughts) possible. If mere existence of these modules is enough to call them irreducible moral categories, well... it's up to us. But neither Haidt nor other moral psychologists use this term (as for my knowledge). But maybe I am missing something. 

Thank you for interesting question.